Real Estate Is Your Business is a series of conversations with the innovators, entrepreneurs, and thought leaders at the forefront of the modernization of the real estate industry. Hosted by real estate technology entrepreneur Thomas Kutzman and business development expert Scott Pollack, you will hear the about the exciting technological and business innovations that are improving the way we live, work, and pretty much do everything.
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Thomas Kutzman and Scott Pollack review their journey on âReal Estate Is Your Businessâ, notable guests, what the hosts have learned, and how the industry is transforming, in the MouthMedia Network studios powered by Sennheiser.
034 â Minta Kay and Salil Gandhi of Goodwin Procter â The Law of PropTech
Episode 35
Thursday, September 27, 2018 ⢠Duration 54:23
Law firm Goodwin Procter LLP launches PropTech practice to serve intersection of real estate and technology innovationâŚ
Minta Kay (Chair of Goodwinâs Real Estate Industry group) and Salil Gandhi (partner in Goodwinâs Technology group) of Goodwin Procter LLP, join Thomas Kutzman and Scott Pollack in the MouthMedia Network studios powered by Sennheiser. Presented by Prevu.
In this episode:
What inspired the PropTech initiative at Goodwin Procter
The firmâs huge global real estate bench, and huge technology bench
How the firm has been getting a lot of calls, inquiries
Woke up with convergence of practices, obvious place to go
Tech â type of company, not an industry sector
Also Fintech, Blockchain, do a lot in that space as well
Real estate has been slow to adopt techâthatâs changing
Need to pay attention, a cascade coming down around them
Real estate becoming a service instead of just a hard asset
The greatest potential for opportunity
From first innovations on prop tech side on consumer listing sites, been seeing it on consumer side for awhile, bigger than a couple of entrepreneurs disrupting
Investors are investing to remain abreast of latest innovations
Keeping informed on opportunities to return investor returns, smarter buildings, manage portfolios
How people are thinking about what a building is and how it is structured, and that it is driving business decisions and entrepreneurial innovation
Why autonomous cars are important for real estate
Why re-purposing of spaces and buildings is huge
Going to raise a lot of new bureaucratic activity, permitting, zoning
Collecting more data than ever before, so sourcing deals to pricing deals, design, maintenance
From one transaction to an ongoing sharing of information
Open-mindedness on real estate and regulatory that will allow innovation to occur
Elasticity in the space is very important
The need to house fleets of vehicles is coming, a shift is needed
How smart contracts can shift advice business
From ballet, chemical engineering and art history â to law
033 â Lisa Fettner of ReferralExchange â People Before Leads
Episode 34
Wednesday, September 12, 2018 ⢠Duration 51:11
A nationwide realtor referral networkâŚ
Lisa Fettner, VP of Marketing for ReferralExchange (real estate agents can submit and receive clients from across the US), joins Thomas Kutzman in the MouthMedia Network studios powered by Sennheiser. Presented by Prevu.
In this episode:
How the role and job of agent has changed in last few years
The need to be hyperlocal while being able to help people everywhere
Why agents needs to be the subject matter expert to help them now and several years down the line, a clientâs entire source for real estate
Now it is all about the relationship
How ReferralExchange is superior, algorythms, look at agentsâ experiences
Look at agents who want to participate and want to be engaged, while looking at their specific areas of expertise
Handling personal info of referrals
Handle tracking, follow up
Most important factor when referring â protecting agent reputation
The concentration of agents in the market, agents in pretty much every populated zip code
Why ReferralExchange operations are in San Francisco and Sacremento
One big challenge these daysâagents donât call leads or referrals back
Minimizing bias, racial concerns based on photos
Advice to be as personalized and customized for clients as possible, keeping clients in mind
Fettnerâs passion: Princess Project â give away prom dresses to teens who canât afford them, promotes inner beauty, self confidence
Donât be afraid to have that conversation â it can lead to a relationship
032 â Ross Guttler of Delos â How Space Can Make Better People
Episode 33
Thursday, September 6, 2018 ⢠Duration 43:30
Health and wellness at the center of the real estate industry âŚ
Ross Guttler, Vice President â Strategic Partnerships for Delos (transforming homes, offices, schools and other indoor environments by placing health and wellness at the center of design, construction, facilities and operations decisions), joins Thomas Kutzman in the MouthMedia Network studios powered by Sennheiser. Presented by Prevu.
In this episode:
How wellness is quite big now and where Delos comes in
Approaching wellness and real estate from hard core science and medicine perspective
What space is doing to our bodies
Light quality and impact on standard of living
How wearables will allow us to measure how space will impact our bodies, and react to what our bodies need
Vetting materials
Construction industries are waking up to âred listâ materials
Practices during construction to protect those building the pace as well
At the crossroads being a real estate or a technology company
Helping groups figure out things
Help co-develop products and technologies
âDarwinâ â technology, the wellness brains for your home
Physical and social environment is 70% of what affects health
The best of North Carolina, and the origin of NASCAR
Why space can make us better, smarter, healthier people
Guttler has spent 15 years in investment, development and advisory roles across multiple product sectors. At Delos, Ross manages strategic relationships among Fortune 100 clients as well as institutional investors, owners and landlords. Having joined Delos in the early stages, he has led the growth of several business lines. In addition, Ross serves in an advisory capacity to a NY-based startup focused on developing spectral sensors for the built environment.
Prior to joining Delos, Ross founded and managed the commercial division of ROI Properties, a brokerage and asset management firm that caters to distressed portfolios. He advised financial institutions, fiduciaries and receiverships on risk allocation and exit strategies for office, industrial and retail assets. Previously, he worked for the ViaWest Group, a commercial investment, development and services firm with a primary focus on value-add and opportunistic office, industrial and multi-family properties.
Ross is a former board member of the Urban Land Institute and has held leadership roles in numerous other industry and non-profit organizations. He received a B.S. in Economics from Duke University and an M.B.A. from Duke Universityâs Fuqua School of Business.
031 â Preston Pesek of Spacious â Accessible and Hospitable Workspaces
Episode 32
Wednesday, August 29, 2018 ⢠Duration 50:33
Restaurants as freelance work spacesâŚ
Preston Pesek, Co-founder/CEO of Spacious (transforming unused space into a city-wide network of stylish, productive workspaces where you can meet, work, and get stuff done) joins Thomas Kutzman and Scott Pollack in the MouthMedia Network studios powered by Sennheiser. Presented by Prevu.
In this episode:
How the way people think about office space has changed
Spacious as a heavyweight of co-working world
The goal for the user experience of product to be as frictionless as possible
The ability to walk in and check in without a reservation
Seamless instant connection to the community, space, WiFi, etc.
Is Spacious more co-working or coffee shop? (Somewhere in between)
How Spacious was conceived
Doing business with restaurant tenants, that was perfect place to enter the market as a start
Value prop for a restaurant space â monthly check, marketing exposure, fill space with room full of people who will be hungry when service begins
Frat culture of co-working vs. higher end vibe at Spacious spaces, attracting more sophisticated/stylish members
Individual workers vs. enterprise play
Fantastic upgrade from a coffee shop
Establishing consumer brand as B-to-C first, then B-to-B, end user is who focused on from experience perspective
Creating a nighttime network for after-5pm spaces
Balancing supply and demand
How Spacious can spin spaces up and down quickly, ability to be responsive to changes in marketplace without big spends
Being able to manage how grow footprint in a balanced way
Is Spacious a tech company or a real estate company?
030 â Ryan Baxter of PASSNYC â PropTech, Education, and Going Big
Episode 31
Thursday, August 16, 2018 ⢠Duration 51:33
PropTech, education reform in New York City, and motivating innovationâŚ
Ryan Baxter, making NYCâs built environment more educational, Founder/Chairman of PASSNYC, Real Estate Liaison for MetaProp NYC, and Co-founder of PropTech Challenge, and former Vice President of REBNY, joins Tom Kutzman in the MouthMedia Network studio powered by Sennheiser. Presented by Prevu.
In this episode:
Real estate tech/prop tech
Baxterâs unique path to prop tech, how he started in a trade association, Real Estate Board of NY
His undying love for NYC, looking for way to work around that, loved lobbying as a concept
The opportunity to make lots of impact
How the Association is older than NYC, serves more than 17,000 members across real estate professions
How Baxter started a regulatory effort on changing how ConEd treats power plants within buildings, taught him a lot about how NYC interacts with and treats tech
Aaron Block, a founder of PropNYC, Â knocked on door asking for help, saw them as distribution platform
How his work allows outcome beyond pursuit of wealth
Bing Co-Founder of Protech challenge, started last year grew to over 100 people from 47 companies,
Moving from personally-participated to virtually to impact many more people, to spur innovation, increase diversity, and create opportunities around the world
An augmented reality tool to overlay real time building information, helpful for engineers to know what a particular systemâs flow of info in real time
A lack of agility and responsiveness in real estate is going changing
The need to understand that there are only five value propositions
A limitless opportunity for the human imagination
A $230 Trillion and growing opportunity worldwide
Developers should lean into PropTech
Why PropTech is years behind FinTech, yet broader than any other tech vertical weâve seen
Is PropTech only one part of it, and a low hanging fruit, and limiting lens?
MetaProp
Starting with community building approach as a new fund
Why learning the language across the industry is crucial
Promoting better educational access and equity using community organizing and coalition tactics
Why the tip of PropTech spear should be public schools, and how they can design the future
Enabling schools to be specialized, motivating participation and resource provision, and working toward continual desegregation
The debate on why specialized schools have value
The Empire State Building, Jay-Z, and a great restaurant
029 â Nathan Hirsch â FreeeUp Your Business to Succeed
Episode 30
Thursday, August 9, 2018 ⢠Duration 34:01
Growing a team by utilizing a marketplace with highly vetted freelancers in a gig economyâŚ
Nathan Hirsch, Founder and CEO of FreeeUp (FreeeUp is a marketplace offering pre-vetted freelance talent) joins Thomas Kutzman for a conversation about growing a business with the right talent. MouthMedia Network studios are powered by Sennheiser. Presented by Prevu.
In this episode:
The gig economy, and accepting the fact that entrepreneurs are not equally good at every part of their business
How FreeeUp provides access to great talent all over the world to help build business
FreeeUpâs original start in ecommerce, then marketing, then real estate agencies (10-15% of their current client are in Real Estate)
An example of a virtual assistant
Whatâs driving the trend of freelancing
The way FreeeUp provides a lot of vetting, only takes the top 1%, and when they let them in
How FreeeUp started with $2k and grew to millions â only using freelancers from their own marketplace, and running a virtual company
How they didnât look at FreeeUp company as a software business initially â looked at it as people who matched people â but when they looked at it as software and kept improving it, the company turned a corner
Why freelancing is part of the next wave of the business economy
How FreeeUp has a good foothold â pain points tough to fix, and hard to copy when fixed â looking at any competition in the businessâand the vetting process is challenging to get right
Freelancers have multiple clients each with their own styles, agendas
Spending extra time at beginning setting best expectations will help save countless hours of clarification
Solid communication, feedback to freelancers is critical when employing them
The biggest error: assuming everyoneâs expectations are the same
Diversifying is important different people for different functions
What would you do with extra hours?
An important business lesson, and how Hirschâs entrepreneurial career began with â selling baby products out his dorm
Malekan on Blockchain â technology that gives digital items physical properties
Physical things can only exist in one place at one moment in time
Because of crypto tokens big public blockchains epxploded in value
More and more industries are looking at blockchain, including real estate
There are many applications beyond crypto currency
Before the Internet, restrictions of physical existence worked but blockchain reduces friction or restrictions
Digital items are replicable
Music is a great example of an application of blockchain that can be of value
Blockchain exists on a spectrum, with varying degrees of how to apply it, and is by nature often decentralized
A process to keep you honest
A consensus mechanism
Bitcoin is slow (only a few transaction per second)
Losing a key/passowrd to access, the value is lost
Real Estate doesnât change hands without people knowing about it, likely a blockchain run by government for property in the future
Using blcokchain to potentially democratize ownership and mortgages
How REITs were like an early tokenization, good step in that direction
While REITS are cumbersome and expensive, can take the REIT model and issue tokensi instead, a tradeable avatar
A lot of creativity possible
Like a co-op model, real estate distilled down to shares
A home is an indivisible asset, tokenization can enable that, financing aspect â you go to one bank, one loan, future can offer breaking debt into pieces each with other people
Fractional ownership, fractional debt
Nomadic lifestyles enabled by fractional ownership shares in properties to live in places not regular residence, like a timeshare
Creatively applied can improve on good parts, lose bad parts
Airbnb a perfect example of Web 2.0 kind of business, someone builds platform, people use it, and most of value goes to owner of platform.
Whether a value of Blockchain can be to mediate disputes
How you can determine cryptocoin has value despite being digital
Becoming The Explainer in Chief
Model United Nations, learning to debate, valuable life lessons that it was a popularity contest, not all about substance, from moment you walk into the room relationships
027 â Joy Fan of Storefront â Short-Term Spaces, Long-Term Impact
Episode 28
Thursday, July 12, 2018 ⢠Duration 48:42
Marketplace for short form retail and pop-upsâŚ
Joy Fan, Chief Creative Officer of Storefront (@storefront â the worldâs leading online marketplace for renting short term retail space) joins Thomas Kutzman, Scott Pollack, and guest host Pavan Bahl in the MouthMedia Network studios powered by Sennheiser. Presented by Prevu.
In this episode:
How Storefront âcracked the codeâ on short-term rentals
Real estate brokers have open arms for pop ups, changed from 5 years ago
How pop-ups and short-term rentals transformed from trend to strategy
Perfect timing, how Storefront rode a wave for the last 6 years
Demands of retail has changed
Bringing digital into physical
Providing pricing up front so anyone can see it and share it
Servicing both landlords and tenants
Why Storefront doesnât own spaces, technology makes it easy for brands to search for space
Now in Canada and US, just opened Dallas and Austin, plus already in LA, NYC, SF, Chicago, Miami
Looking at events and experiential, but focus on storefronts
A lot of long-term leases are coming up and vacancy rates have risen a lot in major metropolitan areas
Low cost at a conference
Retail on the rise in US, story-sharing
Making the physical experience feeling sensory like the online presence, creating addiction
The international opportunity â where there is retail and where there is storefront
Fanâs opinion on a brand thatâs getting it done
026 â Doorbell Communities and VeryApt â Bettering the Rental Experience
Episode 27
Thursday, June 28, 2018 ⢠Duration 38:09
Two startups sharing their company visions on providing a better rental experienceâŚ
Benjamin Pleat, CEO/Founder of Doorbell Communities (supercharging apartment living through curated event experiences) and Ashrit Kamireddi, CEO/Co-Founder, and Scott Bierbryer, COO/Co-Founder, of VeryApt (a trusted apartment review community for people who want to make sure their next apartment really feels like home) joins Thomas Kutzman on location at The Future of Real Estate Summit in Miami,FL. Presented by Prevu.
In this episode:
Conferences as a great opportunity to discover new ideas/innovators
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